Thursday, September 06, 2007

Aphorism of the day

Editing is like cooking something very delicate that must be milled or strained three or four or five times. (In practice, more.) If you skimp on steps, you will regret it later on, because the whole thing takes so much trouble that there is no point balking so near the end; and sometimes you just have to keep doing it until the texture, as it were, comes right. No answers in advance on how long it will take, but you can feel when it's acquiring that desirable smoothness.

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About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.